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3 reasons why you should use Google Tag Manager

If you have an online presence you know that every day you find new and interesting app’s and platforms that can increase your revenue. From integrations with Adwords, DoubleClick, Facebook to custom plugins, you need some help inserting all this script in the page that makes it as easy as possible and without asking for developer help.

Google Tag Manager can launch new tags with just a few clicks. Google Tag Manager supports both Google and third-party tags and is the web’s most popular enterprise-grade tag management solution. We have written a lot or articles on how to use it, but we never provided a list of why you should use it, so here it is:

1. Reliable and accurate data.

When your tags aren’t working properly they can impair your site performance, resulting in slow load times, website unavailability, or a loss of functionality. That’s why it’s critical to have a tag management solution in place that allows you to quickly determine the status of your tags.

Easy-to-use error checking and speedy tag loading in Google Tag Manager means you know that every tag works. Be assured that your mission-critical data is being collected reliably and accurately. The IT team will feel confident that the site is running smoothly, so everyone’s happy, even during busy holidays or the launch of a new campaign.

Large brands have implemented Tag Manager to launch their tags exactly for this reason: reliable and accurate data.

PizzaHut, Made.com, AgeUk and many others use Google Tag Manager to manage their tags for Google and third-party platforms.

2. Quickly deploy Google and third-party tags.

With so many measurement tools out there, marketers need flexibility — whether that’s changing tags on the fly or having the ability to easily add tags from other sources.

In Google Tag Manager, marketers can add or change their own tags as needed. Google Tag Manager supports all tags and has easy-to-use templates for a wide range of Google and third-party tags — for web and mobile apps. Don’t see a tag listed? You can add it immediately as a custom tag. With so much flexibility, your campaign can be underway with just a few clicks.

Even if you are using Adwords, Adroll, Facebook, Hotjar, Criteo or your own script you can implement it with Google Tag Manager.

Even if you’re a publisher as nationalgeographic-magazine.com, sell furniture at Made.com, sell event tickets as eventbrite.com or organise courses as redcrossfirstaidtraining.co.uk, Google Tag Manager will be the best way to organise all the scripts your partners provides.

3. Collaborate across the enterprise and make tag updates efficiently.

Collaboration across a large team can be a challenge. Not having the proper tools can stall workflows — decreasing productivity and efficiency.

Workspaces and granular access controls allow your team to work together efficiently within Google Tag Manager. Multiple users can complete tagging updates at the same time and publish changes as they’re ready. Multi-environment testing lets you publish to different environments to ensure things are working as expected.

I don’t know about you but for me, every time I need to add a new script on my website I hesitate because I am afraid that my website will break and I would never know how to fix it. I wanted a solution where I could add a script on my own, test it and then publish it without any developer help. And then I found Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager lets you collaborate and work independently, at the same time, on the same website. You can publish a tag at the same time your marketing team-mate is creating an A/B testing experiment, all in the same GTM container.

Large and small websites use Google Tag Manager to integrate and increase the value of their website. It is free, it is reliable and you find a lot of how-tos on the web so you can start using it right away.

Google Tag Manager currently provides out-of-the-box integration with these ones:

Universal Analytics – Google Analytics

Classic Google Analytics – Google Analytics

AdWords Conversion Tracking – AdWords

AdWords Remarketing – AdWords

DoubleClick Floodlight Counter – DoubleClick

DoubleClick Floodlight Sales – DoubleClick

Google Optimize – Google Optimize

Google Surveys Website Satisfaction – Google Surveys

AB TASTY Generic Tag

Adometry

AdRoll

Affiliate Window

Affiliate Window

Audience Center 360

Bizrate Insights

ClickTale

comScore

Crazy Egg

Criteo

Dstillery

Eulerian Analytics

Google Trusted Stores

Hotjar

Infinity Tracking

Intent Media

K50

LeadLab by wiredminds

LinkedIn

Marin Software

Mediaplex

Microsoft Bing Ads

Mouseflow

Neustar

Nielsen

Nudge Content Analytics

Optimise Media

OwnerListens

Perfect Audience

Personali

Placed Inc.

Pulse Insights

Quantcast

SaleCycle

SearchForce

Shareaholic

Survicate

Tradedoubler

Turn

Twitter

Ve Interactive

VisualDNA

Yieldify

This out-of-the-box integration doesn’t require any special knowledge. And, for any other script that you might have, most of the providers have a how-to guide for integrating with Google Tag Manager.

Have any questions about Google Tag Manager? Get in touch with our experts!

Alexandra

Previously led retail and digital marketing for LEGO Certified Stores and PANDORA. She’s experienced in PPC, affiliate, e-commerce, travel and news websites. She has a Master's degree in economic analysis.

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Littledata’s Shopify app is updating to use Google’s latest tracking code library. This will simplify your setup for Google Ads and speed up your site.
Google’s ‘global site tag’ or gtag has been live for a year now and is stable for Littledata to adopt. In version 5 of our tracking script we now use gtag for all the events sent to Google Analytics.
The advantages of gtag are:
Integrates with Google Ads out of the box – no need for separate Google Ads conversion tracker
Smaller Javascript library = faster page load times
Future proof for using Google Optimize
In addition, we are now using the standard 'data layer' format used by Google Tag Manager. This will make it easier for all you hackers to extend Littledata's tracking and use GTM with the enhanced ecommerce data layer, and easily create tags for marketing platforms like: Facebook, Criteo, etc.
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We've also moved to using the default ecommerce event naming recommended by Google. For example, the event category 'Ecommerce' is now 'ecommerce' (lower case) and event action 'Add to cart' is now 'add_to_cart' (snake case). If you have goals or reports based on the old event names you may need to update them.
One final change is that we're only sending page views to GA when the page is not hidden in the browser. Certain advertising campaigns, including SnapChat ads, preload your webpages to provide a faster experience for users, but this skews your analytics with lots of low-grade visits who didn't actually 'see' your landing page.
How to update the script
If your store already has our tracking script installed, just click on the in-app notification to update.
Not a Littledata user yet? If you're struggling with implementing Google Ads conversion tracking or GTM for a Shopify store, check out our Google Analytics connections for Shopify and Shopify Plus stores. Let our app fix your tracking, so you can get back to business!

In two high-profile data breaches this year – at Ticketmaster and British Airways – over half a million credit cards were stolen via a compromised script inserted on the payment pages.
Google Tag Manager is a powerful tool which enables you to insert any script you want onto pages of your website, but that power can used against you by hackers if you're not careful – and below we’ll look at how to stop GTM being a security risk on your payment pages.
Firstly, how did the hackers get the card details from these sites? And how is it relevant to GTM on your site?
Security firm RiskIQ has traced the breach to a compromised Javascript file which skimmed the card details from the payment form. So when a user entered their credit card number and security code on BritishAirways.com (or their mobile app) those details were posted to a third party server, unknown to British Airways or the customer. This is a high-scale equivalent of placing a skimming devices on an ATM, which reads one card at a time.
In Ticketmaster’s hack the script was one loaded from a chatbot vendor on their site, Inbenta. Inbenta claims not even to have been aware the script was used on payment pages. The changes to the script were subtle: not breaking any functionality, and in BA’s case using a domain ‘baway.com’ which looked somewhat authentic.
To protect your site against a similar attack you obviously need to lock down accounts used by your developers to change scripts in the page source code, but you also need to secure GTM – which can be used to deploy such scripts.
We have a few rules at Littledata to help reduce risks in using tag management on payment pages:
1. Use pixels over custom JavaScript tags on payment pages
You probably need a few standard tags, such as Google Analytics, on payment pages but try to avoid any custom scripts which could possibly skim card details. Many non-standard tags use JavaScript only to create the URL of a tracking pixel – and it is much safer (and faster) to call the tracking pixel directly. Contact the vendor to find out how.
(Littledata's Shopify app even removes the need to have any script on the payment pages, by hooking into the order as it's registered on Shopify's servers)
2. Avoid loading external JavaScript files in GTM
Many vendors want you to load a file from their server (e.g. myvendor.com/tracking.js) from GTM, so they can update the tracking code whenever they want. This is flexible for them, but risky for you. If the vendor gets hacked (e.g. with Inbenta above) then you get compromised. It’s less risky to embed that script directly in GTM, and control version changes from there (although a fraction slower to load the page).
Of particular risk is embedding a tag manager within a tag manager – where you are giving the third party rights to publish any other scripts within the one tag. Don’t do that!
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3. Lock down Edit and Publish rights on GTM
Your organisation probably has a high turnover of contract web developers and agencies, so have you checked that only the current staff or agencies have permission to edit and publish? It's OK to have external editors use 'workspaces' for version control in GTM, but ideally someone with direct accountability to your company should check and Publish.
4. Blacklist custom JavaScript tag on the payment pages
You can set a blacklist from the on-page data layer to prevent certain types of tags being deployed on the payment pages. If you have a GTM container with many users, this may be more practical that step 3.
5. Remove tags from old vendors
There are many thousands of marketing tools out there, and your company has probably tried a few. Do you remove all the tags from vendors when you stop working with them? These are most at risk of being hacked. At Littledata we run a quarterly process for marketing stakeholders opt-in tags they still need for tracking or optimisation.
6. Ensure all custom JavaScript tags are reviewed by a developer before publishing
It can be hard to review minimised JavaScript libraries, but worth it for payment pages if you can’t follow rules 1 and 2.
If you’re still worried, you can audit the actual network requests sent from payment pages. For example, in Chrome developer tools, in the 'Network' tab, you can inspect what requests sent out by the browser and to what servers. It’s easy for malicious code to hide in the patchwork of JavaScript that powers most modern web experiences, but what is harder to hide is the network requests made from the browser to external servers (i.e. to post the stolen card information out).
This request to Google Analytics is fine, but if the domain of a request is dubious, look it up or ask around the team.
Good luck, and keep safe with GTM!